30Maghrebs — new beginnings and lessons learned

It is always difficult to make predictions, especially when it is about the future. Yet this is the challenge we set ourselves to do with 30 Maghrebs.

However today, year into it, we would like to announce that we decided to close 30 Maghrebs to focus on exploring other alleys we can promote he Maghreb through.

Our ambition with 30 Maghrebs was to gather 30 individuals of 30 years old or under to share their views and opinions about the future of the Maghreb region we come from. We wanted to explore the question “how do we see the Maghreb in the next 30 years?” and voice alternative stories coming from young people from the region.

We believe this work of prospective would help change the narrative and inspire young people in our communities to find solutions and work together to enact a desirable future in the Maghreb.

Our Story

After few weeks of our initial call to contributors, the response was overwhelming. Over 130 people applied to join the adventure. We were 5 organisers. We selected 45 participants, all under 30 years and based out of 12 different countries from the US to Lebanon. In the end, we published 13 articles on this blog.

The contributions took different formats both in fiction and non-fiction and covering a wide range of topics from Maghreb Identity and women’s place in society to the future of education and a heartfelt cry to a future United States of Maghreb. We also published a manifesto which set the tone of our publications and explicated the values that brought us together.

Lessons Learned

Maghreb 30s was a beautiful experience, it helped bring together an outstanding group of people and gave them a platform to voice their concerns about the future of their region and about topics which are seldom discussed. However, It was an arduous process to onboard and coordinate the work of so many people. We failed to get to 30 publications as intended and we failed to reach a larger audience outside of our respective networks.

When looking back at this experience though, there are some key learnings that might benefit other community organisers in the Maghreb. We wanted to share with you our most important ones before saying goodbye:

1. Meet in real-life first: Internet is amazing — a project like this one would have been impossible few years back. However, because most of us did not meet, it was hard to build trust and a rapport that would smoothen the online collaboration process. We strongly recommend to kick-off with a physical get together in the future.
2. Know your contributors The quality of the contributions depends on the quality of the onboarding. After the early burst of enthusiasm at the beginning, attention started to fade and it became difficult to keep contributors engaged. Several deadlines were missed sometimes communication ceases all together. It might have been wiser to spend some more time on onboarding our contributors, understanding their motivations and aligning expectations on both sides.
3. Respect your timelines — the whole project slow down as contributions started coming late, we were not able to respect several timelines we set for ourselves and shared with our community. That led to more frustration and more contributions coming later. A vicious cycle that we could have escape by planning for contingencies and perhaps being stricter with deadlines.
4. Communicate on their terms: we set up a slack channel to communicate internally but it was not used much. We should have changed that early enough to accommodate people preferences. Also, working across 12 countries with widely different time zones has an impact on the outcomes. It’s probably better to form mini-groups based on similar time zones
5. Partner up — we tried to reinvent the wheel by building our on platform on Medium and facebook. It would have been wiser to partner up with an existing media who has a strong following already and who can amplify our voice.
6. How is your team spirit? with time even we, the organisers, started getting frustrated and demotivated. Since we were in different parts of the world, it was also difficult for us to communicate about that and find solutions. The flame we had at the beginning slowly died off.

We are incredibly grateful for all the people who joined the adventure, all the contributors XX and all the people who supported us, read, shared and discussed out content. We learned so much in the past year about the Maghreb and the Maghrebians, we felt inspired often times and felt the very real need of a forum for the Maghreb youth to debate its future.

Next steps

For now, we will keep the medium page open but we will stop sharing new content. We will keep in touch with the outstanding community of talented individuals we gathered and we are already thinking of other format and potent ideas we can instantiate to promote a prosperous and sustainable Maghreb region.

Should you want to keep in touch and hear about our upcoming endeavours, feel free to subscribe to our facebook page

See you soon and tanmirit!

Anais, Ismail, Moh, Rym, Yanis